Video games generally involve animated graphical or cartoon characters in their display which are created by the game creator and are not changeable. U.S. Pat. No. 4,710,873 discloses a technique for substituting a digitized image of real life person for the game character. This involves only the face of the person and the image, once merged into the game is fixed and does not change, giving a somewhat artificial appearance.
Camcorders are commonly used to produce home movies which are either unplanned as to format (e.g. scenes of a birthday party) or, if staged, are usually of an amateurish nature and uninteresting. A technique that uses a video booth to merge the image of a person into a pre-recorded video to create more interesting animated scenes is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,688,105. This is done by means of blue-field chroma key removal of a screen behind the customer. A video camera captures the live video of the customer which is then merged into the pre-recorded video. This approach, however, does not allow the customer to take advantage of many computer-based digital effects. It also limits personalization, as only images of the customer in the booth can be included. A relatively new concept on the market offered by Kideo Productions of New York City creates a personalized story on videotape. The use selects a story and submits a suitable print of the "star" to be incorporated into the video. This appears to be similar to the video game concept described above in which fixed images are used in the resultant video.
It is therefore desirable to provide apparatus and method for creating personalized video presentations in which individual images can be merged with pre-existing video programs to provide more realistic and entertaining presentations than heretofore proposed.